MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Donald Trump is consistent about almost nothing. Which is what makes his long-running war on truth and facts all the more remarkable. The President’s lack of concern for established facts is long and well-documented. According to the latest tabulations by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Trump has said 8,718 false or misleading things in his first 759 days in office. That’s, roughly, 11.5 lies or misleading statements a day. Every day…He is aggressively eroding the idea of fact and truth for a simple reason: Because it furthers his own political interests. Trump ran as the ‘anti-elites’ candidate, casting himself as someone not bound by the political correctness and liberalism that Democrats, the media and even many establishment Republicans had foisted over the average person over the past decades. Somehow, the notion of ‘facts’ and ‘truth’ became elitist in Trump’s hands: These fact-checkers work for the mainstream media. The mainstream media is liberal and biased. Ergo, their ‘truth’ can’t be trusted. It worked. And as his campaign against facts proved successful, Trump has grown more and more brazen about it.”
–Chris Cillizza, “Donald Trump just dropped another bomb in his war on truth,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, February 19, 2019 10:46 pm